Providing cellular service to occupants traveling on mobile platforms such as buses, trains, ships or aircraft, or individuals located in remote areas not covered by classical cellular carriers, has proven to be a challenge. This is because cellular phone networks, while well known and ubiquitous, are still providing services in geographically fixed areas. Cell phone users enter cellular networks while physically located within regulatory assigned, geographical regions around the world. The user's personal profile information is then looked up in a carrier's database for access to the serving (local) carrier's network. If the network that the user is physically accessing is not the user's own cellular service provider, then the network is termed a “foreign” network.
When the user is attempting to access his/her cellular service provider through a foreign network, then roaming arrangements between the user's carrier (i.e., home location register (HLR)) and the network access provider (i.e., visitor location register (VLR)) are required in order to provide the user with cellular service in the geographic area covered by the foreign network. Roaming arrangements between all carriers is not ubiquitous and service is denied to the user in regions where these roaming arrangements have not been adopted. Thus, a cost effective, global, equal access method is needed to enable cellular phone use on mobile platforms that often move at high speeds (and particularly so for modern day jet aircraft) across multiple geographic cellular regions, and where no cellular coverage may exist, such as in remote locations, or where coverage is no longer obtainable. The classic cellular roaming arrangement does not provide the capability to connect subscribers where there is no specific cellular infrastructure in place to cover the subscriber's location (e.g., mobile platforms such as aircrafts, ships, trains or in remote locations). Furthermore, no single cellular carrier can justify the implementation of global service coverage due to specific geographic licensed operational constraints. As a result, mobile subscribers (i.e., subscribers traveling on busses, ships, trains and aircraft, etc.) are required to drop existing connections before roaming into a region covered by a foreign network, and then are required to reestablish connections via the new foreign network.
One attempt at alleviating the problem of enabling mobile users to maintain connections with their cellular service provider is to employ the use of “picocells”. Picocells have been deployed in confined spaces such as within buildings, and even within specific rooms within a building, to allow occupants to communicate with mobile phones and wireless computing devices. With mobile platform (aircraft, ships, etc.) applications, the major technical problem is that there is no way to connect a mobile or remotely located picocell to the ground based cellular infrastructure at a sufficiently low cost, and with equal access being provided to all cellular service providers capable of serving the mobile or remotely located picocell. Simply connecting to a single cellular service provider would not be a viable solution, as it would exclude the portion of the population not subscribing to that particular cellular carrier's service or to those who have a roaming agreement with that particular cellular carrier. This would also be highly undesirable for the remaining cellular carriers that have been excluded. Furthermore, it is impractical to establish roaming relationships with all cellular carriers. Therefore, it is highly desirable to offer access to all cellular service providers based on what services they can provide to the end users traveling on a mobile platform or located at a remote location.
It therefore would be highly desirable to provide a system and method that allows an occupant on a mobile platform, or in a remote location, the opportunity to establish a wireless communications link with the user's terrestrial-based cellular service provider, and further when the user is outside a geographic coverage region of his/her service provider, and further with the assistance of a foreign network. Such an invention would make it unnecessary to rely on roaming agreements to establish voice and data communications between users on board a mobile platform or in a remote area and each user's own cellular service provider when the user is outside of his/her cellular service provider's geographic coverage region.